TE 2006 (TE)
FLUIDS Bulletin - 29th Issue
FLUIDS Project Partners:
MIZAR Automazione S.p.A. (Co-ordinator)
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
DFKI German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence GmbH
Consorzio 5T
An interesting case for the application of knowledge-based graphics
generation is presented in Chen et al. [1998].
The article is concerned with information visualization for
collaborative computing and describes a novel approach which uses
visualization techniques to provide better access to large
repositories of text documents.
Chen et al. have developed a prototype tool as an add-on for
an electronic meeting system developed at the University of Arizona
and installed at more than 1,500 business, government, and university
settings.
The tool automatically categorizes information, statistically clusters
similar documents, and displays the organized document set graphically
to provide more information at a glance than a typical text-based
display.
Text analysis techniques are used to identify descriptors and develop
an unambiguous internal representation of a document.
The comments or notes from the participants of an electronic meeting
are organized into a two-dimensional grid based on the similarities
between documents and furthermore the topic or category that
characterizes each cluster of similar documents is determined.
The tool displays the graphical image of the document map using
general-purpose color and layers.
This kind of interface allows users to more easily browse document
collections within the electronic meeting system.
An interesting example in the use of user modeling techniques in deploying
personalized World-Wide Web services is the One-to-One
development tool from
BroadVision Inc.
in California, USA.
The tool uses both stored and learned customer profiles in combination
with business rules to determine what information or services to present.
BroadVision One-to-One
is an industrial-strength software application system for rapid
development and real-time operation of large-scale, personalized
Internet, Intranet, and Extranet business applications.
The base product supports large user and content databases, high
transaction volumes, intelligent agent matching, and easy integration
with existing business systems. It also incorporates a suite of
management tools that empower non-technical business managers, content
editors, and Web masters to dynamically control application behavior
from their desktops.
The One-to-One product line includes also packaged
applications for electronic commerce, financial services, and
corporate knowledge management.
INLG-98, the latest biennial
International Natural Language Generation Workshop,
attracted a high proportion of European investigators and underlines
the high quality of European research activities within this field.
A specific focus of the work reported at the conference was on
sentence planning as well as joint planning of content and formulation.
Concerning current approaches to text realization it is interesting to
note that both deep and shallow grammars are being considered.
Another hot topic in current research is the definition of a reference
architecture for natural language generators.
Regarding the potential application of natural language generation
techniques it is very promising to see that a large number of system
demonstrations at the workshop were contributed by European research
groups.
The
9th International Workshop on Natural Language Generation,
INLG-98,
indicates that the field is no longer dominated by reseachers from
North America although there is still a very active research community
both in academia and industry.
A special focus of current research seems to lie on planning and
generation with multiple media as well as on architectural questions.
Only one contribution originated from Japan. This work is related to
dialog planning.
As reported in Cohen et al. [1998], the US Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency has launched a project that focuses on technology for
developing very large, flexible, and reusable knowledge bases.
Evaluation of the constituent technologies centers around two
challenge problems in crisis management and battlespace reasoning.
Since the project aims at the development of integrated systems - in
other words knowledge-based, interactive software systems - this
large-scale research activity is highly relevant with regard to the
field of intelligent user interfaces.
-
EACL'99:
-
9th Conference of the European Chapter of the
ACL
,
Bergen, Norway, June 8-12, 1999.
The EACL Conference addresses all research topics in the field of
computational linguistics including natural language generation as
well as multimodal interfaces.
-
UM'99:
-
Seventh International Conference on User Modeling
,
Banff, Canada, June 20-24, 1999.
The biennial user modeling conference constitutes a primary forum for
disseminating the results of academic and industrial research in the
field of user modeling.
-
AAAI'99:
-
16th National Conference on Artificial
Intelligence
,
Orlando, FL, USA, July 18-22, 1999.
The national summer conference of the
American Association for Artificial Intelligence
constitutes an important forum for the scientific interchange among
Artificial Intelligence researchers and practitioners from all over
the world.
-
IJCAI'99:
-
16th International Joint Conference on
Artificial Intelligence
,
Stockholm, Sweden, July 31 - August 6, 1999.
The biennal IJCAI is the main international gathering of researchers
in AI. The conference covers all aspects of current research in the
field of Artificial Intelligence.
Europe has a very active and internationally recognized Natural
Language Generation (NLG) research community.
A particularly high concentration of NLG activities is visible in
Scotland.
The following World-Wide Web page serves as a repository for
information about NLG research at various Scottish universities and
departments, and the people who are doing it:
Another important center for Natural Language Generation research in
Europe is located in Saarbrücken, Germany.
On the Saarbrücken campus many research activities are pursued in
this field, both at the University and at
DFKI
,
the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence.
Useful pointers to NLG-related R&D efforts in Saarbrücken are
available from the following address:
A more complete overview of research projects related to Natural
Language Generation in Germany is provided at:
- H. Chen, J. Nunamaker, R. Orwig, O. Titkova.
- Information Visualization for Collaborative Computing. Computer, 31(8), 75-82, 1998.
- P. Cohen, R. Schrag, E. Jones, A. Pease, A. Lin, B. Starr, D. Gunning, M. Burke.
- The DARPA High-Performance Knowledge Bases Project. AI Magazine, 19(4), 25-49, 1998.
- INLG-98.
- Proc. of INLG'98: Nineth International Workshop on Natural Language Generation
, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada, Association for Computational Linguistics, 1998.
Gerd Herzog
Last update: Mon Jan 18 14:20:43 MET 1999
Send comments to herzog@acm.org© DFKI GmbH, 1996-1999
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